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If you are a parent of a child who has dyslexia, you probably know how overwhelming and confusing it can be to learn about dyslexia. To complicate matters, even though dyslexia has been identified and studied for nearly 150 years,¹ there are still so many misconceptions about it that persist today, making it difficult to make an informed decision about your child’s education.

In recent decades, there has been a growing body of neuroscientific research clarifying what dyslexia is, but sometimes even that can feel a bit inaccessible. How is a parent to make sense of it all?

Welcome to A Parent’s Guide to the Neuroscience of Dyslexia!

In this article, we’re going to dig into the brain science behind dyslexia to help you understand what dyslexia is and how it impacts your child’s reading and spelling journey so that you can make the best educational decisions for your child and be your child’s number one advocate.

Basics of the Human Brain

Let’s start with a few basics about the human brain and where language processing – including reading and spelling – happens.

There’s an area on the left side of the brain, in the general vicinity of the left ear, that’s called the Left Occipital-Temporal Cortex. Within that region, there are a few highly specialized areas responsible for processing all forms of language – listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Two small areas in that region are called Broca’s Area and Wernicke’s Area, and they are responsible for speech sounds.² There’s another small area that’s responsible for hearing phonemes, or letter sounds. Finally, there’s an area of the brain that plays a huge role in reading and spelling called the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA), also called the brain’s “letterbox.”³

There won’t be a quiz on this, and it’s okay if you don’t remember what each area is called, but it’s helpful to see that the majority of language processing and reading activities happen in this very small, very specialized area of the brain. Knowing about these areas of the brain will be helpful in understanding what dyslexia is.

How the Neurotypical Brain Learns to Read

To understand what dyslexia is, though, we have to first understand how the neurotypical brain (one without dyslexia) learns to read.

From birth, children begin taking in language. They become familiar with the particular sounds of their mother tongue, and they begin to distinguish language sounds from other types of sounds. In brain scans, infants as young as 2 months old showed this language specialization. When sentences were spoken to these infants, the language centers of the brain were activated on the scans. That means that even though babies don’t yet understand the meaning of the words being spoken, their brains are already able to distinguish language from other types of sounds.⁴

As children continue to grow and develop, their language skills become more refined. Not only can they listen and comprehend, but they begin to speak – first in babbles and eventually in fully-formed sentences. As they begin learning to read, the VWFA (Visual Word Form Area) of the brain becomes activated.⁵

In every child’s brain, the process of learning to read is a bit disorganized and scattered at first, though. As the child learns the alphabet sounds (phonemes) and begins to blend those together into words, many parts of the brain are activated, not just the language and VWFA. Areas responsible for attention, working memory, etc. are activated alongside the VWFA and other language areas.⁶ That’s because the brain has to work incredibly hard to take in the letters, process them, and output meaningful words, and it doesn’t do it very efficiently at first.

This is why children start out by sounding out every letter and painstakingly blending those sounds together to form a word. Anyone who’s taught a child to read knows how slowly the child reads at first. That’s a completely normal part of the process!

Fluency and Automatization in Reading

However, as the child becomes more proficient at reading, the brain trims the unnecessary neural pathways in the same way a gardener prunes a tree. All of the brain’s resources become increasingly more centralized in that language area of the brain, and the brain forms “shortcuts” and specializations. This continuously happens as the child’s reading proficiency increases so that by the time a person has reached adulthood and is an advanced reader, only a few highly specialized areas – especially the VWFA – of the brain are activated during reading. The brain has developed “super highways” that make reading an automatic process.

Dr. Jacob Santhouse, LCPC, compares it to taking the scenic route versus taking the highway.⁷ When a child is first learning to read, it’s almost as if their brain is taking a scenic drive on a rural mountain road. Instead of taking a shortcut or using the highway, the early reader’s brain goes the long way around, so it takes longer and there are more opportunities for mistakes. However, as the child becomes increasingly fluent in reading, the brain begins to find faster and more efficient “roads” to process written information.

The Dyslexic Brain is Different

As you may have already guessed, the dyslexic brain is different. Instead of forming those fast neural “highways” for reading, a dyslexic child’s brain pretty much always takes the scenic mountain roads and, therefore, always has to work much harder when reading.

In brain scans, neuroscientists have found that in 9-year-old readers identified as having dyslexia, the VWFA and the areas responsible for speech sounds aren’t activated as expected when they’re shown words. Yet other non-language areas of the brain are activated.⁸ This means that instead of information going quickly from Point A to Point B, it has to go the long way around and is processed by non-specialized areas of the brain. This makes it very difficult for dyslexic learners to automatize their reading (or read seemingly automatically).

While the human brain has an amazing capacity to compensate when one area doesn’t work as expected, it does cause some challenges. In addition to the dyslexic child’s brain already having to work harder to read, it doesn’t always correctly sequence the letters or even process them in the correct direction. Because of that, we see signs of dyslexia, such as mixing up the letters in a word, like reading “from” as “form.” We also see letter reversals, such as switching b and d. It isn’t that the child can’t see the letters; it’s that the brain’s letterbox is getting mixed up.

If you think about taking a rural mountain road that you’re unfamiliar with, you can imagine how many wrong turns you might make or how easy it would be to get turned around, especially if the roads aren’t very well marked. Reading for the dyslexic child is similar. Because the brain doesn’t go directly from Point A to Point B, there’s more room for error, especially because the dyslexic brain has to rely on regions of the brain that aren’t necessarily specialized for language processing.

It’s also tricky because a lot of children with dyslexia have less working memory than their non-dyslexic peers, which means they simply cannot hold as much information in their minds at once.⁹ Add that to the fact that instead of processing information using the shortest possible route, their brains must process information the “long way around,” and you can see why reading is such a struggle.

There is Hope for Children with Dyslexia

Thankfully, there is a lot of hope for children with dyslexia. At one time, it was believed that dyslexic individuals couldn’t learn to read and spell. We now know that’s not true, and we have the neuroscience to back it up!

The National Reading Panel has conducted groundbreaking research to discover that reading and spelling programs that “teach phonics systematically and explicitly…are the most effective” for students with dyslexia. The most successful programs incorporate these five essential components, called “The Big Five:” explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, systematic phonics instruction, techniques to improve fluency, vocabulary development, and reading comprehension.¹⁰

That’s where All About Reading and All About Spelling come in.

Our programs not only incorporate “The Big Five” components needed for dyslexic students to become proficient in reading and spelling, but they take a multisensory approach that uses multiple pathways to the brain to make reading and spelling accessible for all students. In Part 2 of A Parent’s Guide to the Neuroscience of Dyslexia, we’ll discuss how our research-based programs help rewire a dyslexic student’s brain so it doesn’t remain stuck on those circuitous mountain roads forever.

Finally, I want to encourage you that while methodology matters, one of the most important factors for success in a dyslexic child’s life is how strong his support system is. I’ll leave you with this quote from Sally Shaywitz, a leading dyslexia expert in the United States:¹¹

Stay tuned for Part 2 of A Parent’s Guide to the Neuroscience of Dyslexia to learn more about how and why our approach to teaching reading and spelling works.

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¹Kirby P. (2020). Dyslexia debated, then and now: a historical perspective on the dyslexia debate. Oxford review of education, 46(4), 472–486. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2020.1747418

²Shaywitz, Sally. Overcoming Dyslexia. 2nd ed., Vintage, 2020.

³The Reading League (2024, June 18). Stanislas Dehaene Summit 2024 Virtual Keynote. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPf2Sf6d5Hk

⁴Ibid.

⁵Ibid.

⁶Ibid.

⁷Santhouse, Jacob (@drjacobsanthouse) (2023, Nov. 12). It may take a second longer, but I would argue that is a result of processing more information… Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/reel/CzjWE0mRCJq/?igsh=ZXd1cjVwbjJzOXU2

⁸The Reading League (2024, June 18). Stanislas Dehaene Summit 2024 Virtual Keynote. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPf2Sf6d5Hk

⁹International Dyslexia Association. Working Memory: The Engine for Learning. https://dyslexiaida.org/working-memory-the-engine-for-learning/

¹⁰Wooldridge, Lorna. The National Reading Panel and The Big Five. Orton Gillingham Online Academy. https://ortongillinghamonlinetutor.com/the-national-reading-panel-and-the-big-five/

¹¹Quote from Shaywitz, Sally. Overcoming Dyslexia. 2nd ed., Vintage, 2020.